Bluetooth® wireless technology is set to revolutionize personal connectivity by providing freedom from wired connections. Bluetooth® is a specification for a small form-factor, low-cost radio solution providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones and other portable and handheld devices.
Bluetooth® wireless technology is an international, open standard for allowing intelligent devices to communicate with each other through wireless, short-range communications. This technology allows any sort of Bluetooth® compliant device—from computers and cell phones to keyboards and headphones—to make its own connections, without wires, cables or any direct action from a user. Bluetooth® is currently incorporated into numerous commercial products including laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and printers, with more products coming out every day.
Bluetooth devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs, are evolving to become more complex as such devices may be adapted to transmit and receive audio information. For example, a Bluetooth® device may utilize a coder/decoder (CODEC) to encode audio information prior to communicating the encoded information to another Bluetooth® device, for example. Similarly, the CODEC may be utilized to decode encoded audio information received from another Bluetooth® device.
In conventional Bluetooth® enabled handheld devices having an integrated Bluetooth® chip, the low-complexity sub-band CODEC (SBC) encoder runs on the handheld's main processor. As a result, the Bluetooth® encoding process utilizes valuable main processor resources, which may otherwise be utilized for handling other tasks being run on the handheld device. In these conventional handheld devices, such as cellular telephones, the handheld device must have sufficient additional processing power to handle tasks associated with encoding SBC audio. As a result of this requirement, cheaper handheld devices that lack adequate processing power are eliminated from ever handling SBC audio encoding. The same is true for other CODECs other than SBC that may be utilized for Bluetooth®.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.